Even though neither U.S. presidential candidate is talking up man-made global warming behind the scenes courts are hard at work making laws based on controversial greenhouse gas science.

An undemocratic, largely unseen shift in American law is now taking place. You would never know it from the media facade but 2012 has witnessed an inexorable Big Green legal juggernaut driving across America. Judges not voters are at the wheel and by stealthy maneuvering we are being steamrollered by secret government diktat rather than electoral preference. It is happening away from the public political barometer because the mainstream media focuses voter minds on believing the race for the Whitehouse is all about the grassroots economy. With $3 billion per year in government climate funding up for grabs neither Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney nor Democrat President Barack Obama appear willing to debate the American courts’ back door imposition of new draconian climate laws. Left unchecked more democracies are headed for the abyss of unreasoned totalitarianism.

Voters don’t know it yet but our courts shifted gear to drive us all to accept – by imposition of law – the cornerstone of man-made global warming science: the greenhouse gas hypothesis. All this despite repeated concerns expressed by conscientious climatologists. For example, only last week another top climate scientist unswerved by government bribes (Dr. John Christy) gave evidence to the U.S. House Energy and Power Subcommittee declaring: “I’ve often stated that climate science is a ‘murky’ science. We do not have laboratory methods of testing our hypotheses as many other sciences do.”

Selected Excerpts: To put it simply, Andreadis and Lettenmaier (2006) found that for the Midwest, “Droughts have, for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, less severe, and cover a smaller portion of the country over the last century.” In other words, droughts have always happened in the Midwest and they are not getting worse.

In a recent study published in Procedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), NASA scientist James Hansen and two colleagues find that whereas “extremely hot” summer weather ”practically did not exist” during 1951-1980, such weather affected between 4% and 13% of the Northern Hemisphere land area during 2006-2011. The researchers infer that human-caused global warming is “loading” the “climate dice” towards extreme heat anomalies. They conclude with a “high degree of confidence” that the 2003 European heat wave, the 2010 Russian heat wave, and the 2011 Texas-Oklahoma drought were a “consequence of global warming” and have (as Hansen put it in a recent op-ed) ”virtually no explanation other than climate change.”

In a recent post, I reviewed studies finding that the aforementioned anomalies were chiefly due to natural variability. In another post, I summarized an analysis by Patrick Michaels and Chip Knappenberger, who conclude that “the 2012 drought conditions, and every other [U.S.] drought that has come before, is the result of natural processes, not human greenhouse gas emissions.”

But what about the very hot weather afflicting much of the U.S. this summer? Greenhouse gas concentrations keep rising, heat spells are bound to become more frequent and severe as the world warms, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports that July 2012 was the hottest July ever in the U.S. instrumental record. Isn’t this summer what greenhouse warming “looks like“? What else could it be?

Dr. John Christy, Alabama's State Climatologist, Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville testified before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works hearing on global warming and stated:

"During the heat wave of late June and early July, high temperature extremes became newsworthy. Claims that there were thousands of records broken each day and that "this is what global warming looks like" got a lot of attention.

A reanalysis of U.S. surface station temperatures has been performed using the recently WMO-approved Siting Classification System devised by METEO-France’s Michel Leroy. The new siting classification more accurately characterizes the quality of the location in terms of monitoring long-term spatially representative surface temperature trends. The new analysis demonstrates that reported 1979-2008 U.S. temperature trends are spuriously doubled, with 92% of that over-estimation resulting from erroneous NOAA adjustments of well-sited stations upward. The paper is the first to use the updated siting system which addresses USHCN siting issues and data adjustments.

The new improved assessment, for the years 1979 to 2008, yields a trend of +0.155C per decade from the high quality sites, a +0.248 C per decade trend for poorly sited locations, and a trend of +0.309 C per decade after NOAA adjusts the data. This issue of station siting quality is expected to be an issue with respect to the monitoring of land surface temperature throughout the Global Historical Climate Network and in the BEST network.

Today, a new paper has been released that is the culmination of knowledge gleaned from five years or work by Anthony Watts and the many volunteers and contributors to the SurfaceStations project started in 2007.

Image SourceUS Government admits global warming satellite sensors “degraded” -temperatures may be out by 10-15 degrees. Now five satellites in controversy. Top scientists speakout.

In an escalating row dubbed ‘Satellitegate’ further evidence proves NOAA knew of these faults for years. World’s top climate scientists and even prior governmental reports cite underfunding and misallocation as the trigger for spiraling satellite data calamities. Key flaws with five satellites undermines global data.

Most disturbing of all is that it took publication of my article last week to persuade the authorities to withdraw the errant NOAA-16 satellite from service. But as Dr. John Christy indicates, the real Satellitegate is not about one satellite. The scandal is endemic with comparable flaws across the entire network; the scandal is also that it took a tip off from a member of the public and the widespread broadcast of my article before one of the offending junk boxes, NOAA-16, got taken down.

Readers who missed the details when this sensational story first broke can seen here at ClimateChangeFraud.com.

NOAA’s chief Program Administrator, Chuck Pistis, at first disingenuously tried to discredit my report and whitewash the matter with disinformation. Indeed, we may have a smoking gun of a cover up when we contrast and compare latest announcements with the offending satellite’s AVHRR Subsystem Summary.

John Christy is an atmospheric scientist and Professor of same at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and winner of achievement awards from NASA and the American Meteorological Society. He was a lead author of the IPCC's 2001 Assessment Report, but in 2007 was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying, "I'm sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see."

The awards he received were for his work in helping develop a temperature dataset based on satellite measurements, and one of the major datasets used in climate science is just known as UAH. He is commonly perceived as a skeptic, but as has been the case with every interview I've done in this sector, the truth is far more nuanced. Professor Christy was kind enough to respond to my request for an interview very quickly, so without further ado...

Examiner: You are commonly labeled as a 'skeptical' scientist who does not agree with the IPCC consensus regarding human contributions to climate change. How accurate is that, and how would you describe your own beliefs regarding this?

J.C. I am mainly skeptical about those who claim to be so confident in understanding the climate system that they know what it is going to do in the next 100 years. This is my main complaint - overconfidence. We of all professions should be the most humble because there is so much about the climate system that we simply do not know. See my testimony given to the Inter Academy Council in June concerning these ideas - I think you will appreciate it.

The scientist behind the controversial 'hockey stick' graph has said it was 'somewhat misplaced' to make his work an 'icon of the climate change debate'.

Professor Michael Mann plotted a graph in the late 1990s that showed global temperatures for the last 1,000 years. It showed a sharp rise in temperature over the last 100 years as man made carbon emissions also increased, creating the shape of a hockey stick.

The graph was used by Al Gore in his film 'An Inconvenient Truth' and was cited by the United Nations body the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as evidence of the link between fossil fuel use and global warming.

But the graph was questioned by sceptics who pointed out that is it impossible to know for certain the global temperature going back beyond modern times because there were no accurate readings.

The issue became a central argument in the climate change debate and was dragged into the 'climategate' scandal, as the sceptics accused Prof Mann and his supporters of exaggerating the extent of global warming.